California Zeros In on the Intractable

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: November 12, 2007

THE wildfires that ravaged communities from Malibu to San Diego last month set off an outpouring of charity from corporate California: the Walt Disney Company and Hewlett-Packard quickly pledged $2 million each, and other local companies promised hundreds of thousands more.

But the avalanche of aid for disaster victims in the wealthy Southern California suburbs could divert attention from what has been a major transformation of the philanthropic landscape in the region, one that can be glimpsed in the ways charitable groups are tackling the most persistent problems of everyday life: poverty, health, housing, education, immigration and what could be simply called urban livability.

The big art institutions and universities continue to prove they can more than fend for themselves. In the last few years, David Geffen gave $200 million to the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, Eli Broad $60 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and George Lucas $175 million to the University of Southern California's film school.

The most intractable social problems, by contrast, require much more than a good architect or hiring a new dean, and they seldom attract donations that reach six digits, let alone eight or nine.

So it was a radical departure when the United Way of Greater Los Angeles -- which had long followed a pattern of spreading its $60 million or so in annual largess in all directions -- announced this year that it would narrow its focus and devote its discretionary giving only to programs that fight poverty.

For the first time, United Way required its affiliates to compete for grants, and the result was a drastic shake-up. Of 200 longtime beneficiary agencies, 90 were dropped, and 50 new recipients were selected. United Way also set 10-year goals, including raising the high school graduation rate to at least 75 percent and putting 10,000 adults through training programs and into jobs with good pay and career growth.

Elise Buik, who took over in 2005 as president of the long-struggling Los Angeles United Way, the nation's 10th largest, said poverty had become a ''dirty word'' and a ''liberal issue'' because of the region's geographic fragmentation and lack of a dominant urban center.

''When you have to walk over homeless people on the way to the subway, it's going to enter your psyche,'' she said. ''But here, we don't touch and see it.''

She added: ''As we started to raise these issues, people were shocked, and they did care. Our job has been to try to broker this into a quality-of-life issue. What people are waking up to is, if we have a 50 percent dropout rate, that's going to affect business and your quality of life.''

Making matters more challenging for United Way, historically reliant on workplace campaigns, has been the loss of some corporate headquarters. ''Bank of America's in Charlotte now,'' Ms. Buik said. ''Times Mirror's in Chicago.''

Targeted campaigns, measurable results and competitiveness have become the bywords for big philanthropies and small nonprofit groups alike, including the $3.5 billion California Endowment, which has handed out $1.8 billion in grants. In April 2006, the endowment -- created 10 years earlier, when Blue Cross of California became a for-profit company -- opened a $62 million downtown headquarters.

Now, the endowment is grappling with how to focus its efforts to fulfill its mission: building healthy communities and ensuring that the state's estimated 800,000 uninsured children get health care.

''We've funded thousands of organizations, a lot of people have benefited, but what do we want to hang our hat on in 5 or 10 years?'' said Paul Hernandez, a spokesman for the California Endowment.

The much smaller Liberty Hill Foundation might point the way, he said. The foundation, a self-described progressive underwriter of grass-roots community-organizing efforts, has as its motto, ''Change, not charity.'' Mr. Hernandez said, ''That's the kind of credo we want to subscribe to, too.''

The California Endowment's impact is already being felt; it helped to end soda sales in the Los Angeles schools, a move later repeated at the state level. It is also helping the City Project, a fledgling nonprofit organization working to broaden access to parks and open space for inner-city residents and, more recently, to fight childhood obesity by guaranteeing that city students get enough physical education.

That long-term goals are still being set by so many of the region's philanthropies should be expected; more than two-thirds of California's foundations have been formed since 1990. But even the California Community Foundation, founded in 1915, only recently made a splash in affordable housing, setting up a land trust to build homes to sell to low-income families. (It has built 80, begun work on 220 more and set plans for an additional 350.)

The region's nonprofit sector mirrors its geography, said Paul Vandeventer, president of Community Partners, a Los Angeles incubator for community groups.